In recent years, video surveillance of public areas, for purposes of enhanced security, has increased considerably. In a typical public venue such as an airport or a shopping mall, feeds from various video sources, such as a security camera, are directed to a central system which in turns streams the video to video client devices. The video client devices and the networks to which they connect can vary considerably. For example, the video clients may range from a client PC connected to the Internet via a fast broadband connection or a Ethernet LAN to a mobile device connected to a relatively bandwidth-constrained wireless carrier network. Among this heterogeneous group of clients, there is typically no single data rate that will satisfy all client demands or requirements. This disparity in data rate requirements can cause overall system performance to suffer as system resources are not intelligently being utilized. For example, transmitting a video stream at one rate has the problem that, in some instances, the video server is transmitting packets at a data rate that a client device or network cannot support. This often leads to packets being dropped and results in wasted bandwidth, which could otherwise have been used to support additional video clients or increase the Quality of Service (QoS) for other video clients.